Snap and Amazon Fashion partner to let shoppers virtually try on eyewear

EMERGING TECH

Amazon.com Inc. is partnering with Snap Inc. to allow Snapchat users to try on popular eyewear brands virtually using its augmented reality Snapchat app lenses.

With the new partnership, Snapchat’s 363 million daily active users able to use dozens of new augmented reality Shopping Lenses that will become available for thousands of different varieties of eyewear, including sunglasses and reading glasses that users can try digitally before they buy.

The system is part of Snap’s Virtual Try-On shopping experience, which allows retailers to create AR experiences for users to see what they would look like wearing their apparel products. It uses the power of augmented reality by scanning the features of the users and overlaying them with an image of the product so that they are modeled wearing it on their own mobile devices.

Other brands that have partnered with Snap in order to use the shopping lenses have included MAC Cosmetics, Ulta Beauty, American Eagle, Puma, Chanel, Walmart and LVMH.

“Amazon Fashion is always looking for new ways to collaborate with brands and create fun, innovative shopping experiences for customers,” said Muge Erdirik Dogan, president of Amazon Fashion. “Millions of customers regularly use Amazon’s AR shopping technology across categories in our stores, with Virtual Try-On for Eyewear being a long-time customer favorite.”

In order to make the experience work, Amazon and Snap built a set of 3D asset standards for the eyewear models based on Amazon’s library of assets and brands that allowed them to be imported into Snap’s AR Try-On Technology.

Popular brands from Amazon that joined this foray included Maui Jim, Persol, Oakley and Costa Del Mar, among others. Eyewear is the first shopping experience as part of the partnership between Amazon Fashion and Snap, and the companies intend to expand the categories in the future.

In order to activate the shopping lenses, Snap users can visit @amazonfashion’s public profile on Snapchat. From there it is possible to activate the shopping experience using the Lens Explorer with the For You and Dress Up tabs and in the Snap Camera Lens Carousel.

This isn’t the first time that an AR app has been used to show off eyewear virtually. The eyewear maker Warby Parker released its own try-on experience in 2019 allowing customers to see what frames would look like on their own faces. As for other fashion, Walmart recently released its own fashion AR experience for customers with a virtual try-on option called “Be Your Own Model” that allows users to see what they’d look like wearing garments.

Amazon itself has been experimenting with AR shopping since 2017 by letting users place furniture into their own homes to see what it might look like and the company also recently expanded its own virtual try-on for shoes in June.

Photo: Pixabay